


Clarity

by Arazsya



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Abduction, Dubious Consent, F/F, Object Insertion, Oral Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-25 16:25:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17124743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arazsya/pseuds/Arazsya
Summary: “I’m Helen,” the woman says. She doesn’t extend a hand for Melanie to shake, but a friendly, professional smile pastes itself onto her face, then falters. “I killed someone this morning.”





	Clarity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DecoySocktopus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DecoySocktopus/gifts).



There is someone else in the Archives. Melanie can hear them, the faint hiss of the floorboards under their feet. It would be too quiet for her to pick up, normally, her head too full of rushing and resentment, but the statement she had just read had left her brain exhaustion-stilled, and it finds its way in through her staring.

It sounds like it’s coming from Jon’s office, a place that’s been standing empty ever since they had found out what had happened in the House of Wax. She hadn’t checked it when she had arrived, but she had been there a while without hearing or seeing anything, and she wouldn’t have recorded a statement if she’d had even the slightest suspicion that there was anyone else there - they’ve been leaving her worse off, lately, and she doesn’t want anyone to see that. Not anyone who’d take advantage of it, and not anyone who’d pity her for it.

It won’t be Martin. He sticks to Jon’s bedside like a repentant man at church, drifts in once in a blue moon to record a statement. Basira’s still making inquiries about Daisy, hounding anyone she knows to be Section 31 for information about whether they’ve found anything yet in the rubble. Peter Lukas only wanders down rarely, and always seems to be careful not to indicate to Melanie that he’s a problem that needs to be solved. Martin and Basira are far more interesting to him, anyway – Martin has nothing, Basira has lost her partner, and Melanie, life as _shockingly devoid of personal connection_ as it is, doesn’t hurt over it in quite the same way that they do, so their new monster boss is never quite so hungry in the way he looks at her.

Melanie gets to her feet, slowly. The tape recorder on the desk clicks on, but it’s relegated in her mind to the same place as the ticking of her watch. It doesn’t matter, now, what Elias or his patron hears. There’s nothing he can do where he is, and if he comes back, no one is going to stop her from dealing with him the way that he needs to be dealt with.

She knocks, and the person on the other side knocks back, a hesitant timbre that matches her own. Melanie frowns, and brings Martin back onto her list of possibles, as the only conscious person she’s aware of who would ever be _that weird_.

“Martin,” she growls. “If you’re hiding in there, then you could at least-”

The knock comes again, the same number of beats, and she dismisses the idea of Martin. He never knocks more than he has to.

The door handle is warm beneath her fingers. Only slightly. Not burning enough to stop her from wrenching it open.

There’s a woman standing on the other side, her arm raised to knock again. She’s older then Melanie, and has the slightly lost expression of a member of the public who’s somehow become horrendously turned around on her way from the library, and would really appreciate an escort to the loos.

Melanie opens her mouth to offer it to her, and then she sees her _hands_. They look like they’ve been drawn by a child who’s very proud of just having worked out how many fingers they’re supposed to have, each one carefully emphasised. The knuckles curl in on themselves, until Melanie loses track of where each one ends. They look sharp.

The knife in Melanie’s desk drawer is sharp, too. She keeps it that way. It’s three paces, back to it. Maybe two seconds to get it out.

Melanie makes the calculation, and finds her chances wanting.

“Hello,” the woman says. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you. I was waiting for the Archivist.”

“You’ll be waiting a while.” Melanie uses the words to cover a half-step backwards. The woman doesn’t seem to notice, so she tries another. “Got himself blown up.”

“Oh.” The woman glances down at the floor, and then back over her shoulder, shuffles back a little herself. “Perhaps I should go, then. Did he die? I think I would have known, if he had died. Which hospital is he in?”

“What do you want with him?” Melanie demands, regrets the words before they’re all the way out of her mouth. Defending Jonathan Sims against any monsters that might come a-calling isn’t in her job description. Or maybe it is. The piece of paper she’d signed hadn’t said anything about it, but it hadn’t said anything about serving an overpowered ever-watching entity, either, but here she is.

“I wanted to ask him for help.” The woman attempts a smile, clasping her hands behind her back, so that she would have looked completely normal, at first glance. She doesn’t, now, because Melanie’s seen too much of her. “He didn’t want to last time, but I thought that he might have changed his mind.”

“Last time?” Melanie’s teeth press into one another. He’d neglected to mention anything about anything like this. “Had the pleasure of his company before, have you? Why would you come back?”

“I don’t feel right,” the woman says. Her eyes land on Melanie properly, and Melanie’s chest tightens, as that attention fixes itself unerringly on her, rapt. It’s like looking at something which should have been in constant motion, abruptly stilled. “Do you understand that?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Melanie announces. “But you’re wasting your time with Jon, so-”

“Maybe you can help?” The woman takes a step out of Jon’s office, her hands starting to drift out from behind her back again.

“Doubt it,” Melanie says. She flexes her own fingers, trying to imagine the knife in them. It’s still too far away.

“But you’re becoming something, too,” the woman tells her, tilting her head, as though she’s trying to find a better fall of light to see Melanie’s face by. The angle of it is wrong. “I can see it.”

“What are you?” Melanie takes a full step back, no longer caring whether the woman sees. She doesn’t burn for the answer to the question as she once would have, but she supposes she should have it, in case Jon ever recovers enough to try to pick her statement out of her, a scratch of fingernails at the back of her throat.

“I’m Helen,” the woman says. She doesn’t extend a hand for Melanie to shake, but a friendly, professional smile pastes itself onto her face, then falters. “I killed someone this morning.”

Melanie waits for a rush of disquiet through her gut, knows that she should feel something like that, on hearing this. But there’s nothing, just a faint acknowledgement of the words, a tick of understanding from her brain.

“Who?”

“No one,” Helen says. “No one important. But that doesn’t matter – he was confused, and he was lost, and I should feel _better_. Have you killed anyone?”

“Not yet.” Maybe it’s that the tape recorder is on, maybe it’s that the others aren’t here to make faces at her for it, but it’s easier to tell the truth than it should be. “I tried. I really wanted to.”

“Did you stop?” There’s a sudden sort of desperation to Helen’s voice, an earnest pull to her features that’s entirely at odds with the subtly monstrous face they’re set in. “Did it not feel right? How?”

“I didn’t get to choose.” Melanie leans back into her desk, and pulls at the drawer. She thinks that her hands could find the knife, without any need for her eyes. “It would have felt like the most right thing in the world.”

Helen relaxes a little, and she smiles at Melanie, properly this time, every part of her face twisting with the expression.

“Thank you,” she says. “You are… more accepting, than the Archivist. I would like to talk with you more. If I could understand you, I think perhaps it might help me to feel better.”

“I’m tired.” Melanie bulldozes through the request, but Helen’s smile doesn’t falter.

“I can come back,” she says. “Another time. I’ll knock.”

“Fine,” Melanie says, because the statement’s aftermath is starting to weigh down on her thoughts again, and it seems like the quickest way out.

Helen nods, and turns back into Jon’s office. She shifts her arms as she does so, moving her hands around to her front, so that Melanie can’t see them, humming faintly as she moves out of sight.

Melanie darts towards Jon’s office, knife in her hand, just in time to see a yellow door close behind Helen. It’s gone a moment later, leaving the faintest trace of that reassured tune, hanging in the air.

Melanie tries to pick it out on a pub keyboard, three nights later, and finds that she doesn’t have enough hands.

-

She corners Martin by one of the filing cabinets, snaps an arm out to block him when he tries to leave with just a brief, unmeant smile – he looks at her the same way a man in full plate armour would look at a lightning storm, but she’s too busy to bother dragging him over the coals about Elias again.

“What do you know about doors?” she asks him. The information she’s been able to find in the Archives is irritatingly sparse, as though someone’s intentionally left out any further examination of the phenomenon, and none of it’s about Helen anyway.

“Doors?” he echoes. There’s not even a flicker of understanding across his features, something hazy around his eyes. Jon is, Melanie supposes, the only one sleeping.

“Doors that weren’t there before,” Melanie elaborates. She tries to think how else to describe them, but Martin’s face completely changes. For a moment, it’s just as it had been when she had found him, after Elias had been at him, and then it twists, forcing itself back into composure, or as close to it as Martin ever gets.

“Don’t go through them,” he says. “He shouldn’t be a problem anymore, Jon said, but Tim and I…” His voice trails off, eyes losing their focus, and she can tell that she’s not going to get anything useful out of him.

“Are there any particular statements I should be looking at?” she prompts, trying to keep her tone on the right side of impatience, not that Basira’s around to chide her if she makes him cry again. She’s off chasing some will-o-the-wisp of a lead on Daisy in Wales, and while she does text, it’s irregular.

“Sure.” Martin’s head drops, so that he’s talking more to the floor than her. “Um, there’s the one the day Jon had to go and get stitches, that one was recorded direct, so it should be with the rest of them. And 0160204.”

He doesn’t usually remember the statement numbers. Melanie glares at him, not that he can see it. Perhaps he feels it, though, because he gives a faint shrug, busies himself folding his hands into his sleeves.

“It’s Sasha’s,” he says, quietly. “The real Sasha.”

Melanie lets him go.

-

Helen is back before the month is out. Melanie looks up from her desk, and finds her sitting on the other side, like she’s always been there. She’s watching her hands in the same way that Melanie has seen tripped-out people do, but when she sees Melanie’s noticed her, she reaches one out, as though she wants Melanie to take it.

Melanie leans back in her chair, and pulls her drawer open to reach for the grip of her knife. Helen has given no indication that she intended Melanie any harm, but it’s better to be prepared.

“I don’t think this is where you’re supposed to be,” Helen announces. She talks carefully, slowly. “Not anymore.”

“Maybe you could tell it that,” Melanie says. She turns the page of the file she had been reading, and tilts her head so that it looks like that’s still what she’s doing.

“Do you like it here?” Helen asks. In Melanie’s peripheral vision, she leans forward, her other elbow resting on the edge of the desk.

“No.” Melanie closes the file, and makes as much of a statement of it as she can. Helen doesn’t react. She just stays where she is, watching Melanie work, her hand still resting, palm-up, against the desk, until Melanie goes to fetch a book from the library. When she comes back, Helen is gone, but they yellow door is still there. It stands in the wall, expectant.

Melanie opens her book, and starts to read. The door follows her home.

-

It’s Peter Lukas’ fault, when it happens. He’s on one of his rare visits to the Archives, leaning against Martin’s empty desk, smiling and asking Melanie joking questions, and not seeming to notice that she wants him gone.

He distracts her. She doesn’t pay enough attention, and the door that her brain tells her will take her out of the Archives doesn’t. There are corridors, beyond it, but when she turns back, the door is gone, and everything is mirrors and turns that don’t make sense.

Melanie doesn’t try to make sense of them. She doesn’t look in the mirrors, doesn’t start to walk, doesn’t try to go anywhere. She just stands, with one foot against the wall behind her, like a nonchalant teenager, and waits.

A shape appears, eventually, a fractured image between all of those mirrors and paintings and photographs, so many of them that, if Melanie had cared to try, she would never have been able to work out which was the original. She rests one hand in the small of her back, palm against the handle of the knife, which she’d started carrying sheathed in her belt.

It resolves itself, once it’s barely two metres away, its form shifting with her perspective, until it’s Helen again, holding out one arm, almost shyly, inviting Melanie to walk with her.

“I’d rather not,” Melanie tells her. “I have work to do. Take me back.” She grips the knife, the angle awkward on her elbow. “Now.”

Helen tilts her head to one side, and her hair takes a moment to remember that it’s supposed to move with gravity. It doesn’t quite get the direction right.

“I’ve seen you work,” she says. “I know you working. It doesn’t help. And you don’t like it there. You hate it. It trapped you.”

“Yes,” Melanie says, and what she intends to sound like patience is just a slow, roiling anger. “And if I want to leave, I have to go back, and work out how.”

“I thought if I helped you, maybe then you would be able to help me,” Helen says, and she moves a little closer, still holding out her arm, expecting Melanie to take it. “So I’ve taken you away from it.”

“Then you should have asked,” Melanie growls. She would have refused, she knows – she’s not an advice bureau for wayward monsters, no matter how Helen or Jon might treat her. “Bring the door back, Helen.”

“No.” Helen’s features shift as she moves closer, as though water-rippled. “That’s not where you want to be.”

Melanie hesitates, reaching for the words to convince, to explain her way out. An insistent part of her, a voice that won’t quiet, keeps reminding her of the knife, wonders if Helen would still bleed.

“If I stay here I’ll get sick.” The sentence is heavy in her throat, a weakness she shouldn’t admit to, but if Helen has convinced herself that she has Melanie’s best interests at heart, or that they’re in some sort of reciprocal arrangement, then that’s what she’ll have to use. “And I won’t be able to help you then, either.”

“It can’t see you here,” Helen says. “It tries, but there is too much for it to look at that isn’t true.”

“And what does that mean?” Melanie’s question is sharp, angry. “Will I get sick faster? Not at all?”

Helen hesitates, her gaze finally breaking from Melanie’s.

“Perhaps,” she edges. “Once I know you better-”

“You don’t know,” Melanie concludes, and lets her tone heat. She means to go on, demand the door back again, but her features just find something akin to a snarl, as she strides forwards, towards Helen. Bolder than she should be, but she’s had enough of being pushed around by things that mean her far more harm than Helen does.

Helen moves to meet her, but Melanie doesn’t flinch, doesn’t stop until one of her hands comes up, and the sharp points of her fingers are abruptly pressing against the hollow of her throat. They don’t go deep enough to draw blood, but they press against the skin like a cat’s claws, and Melanie can feel the potential of it.

Melanie lets them guide her back until her shoulders hit the wall again, and Helen moves with her, her face so close to Melanie’s that Melanie’s almost feeling the pressure of the kiss before it starts. She wonders if Helen’s tongue will be as cutting as her hands.

“Let me help you,” Helen says, and then she closes the distance. Melanie closes her eyes, and tells herself that it doesn’t feel any different to kissing someone who’s still human, except that Helen hesitates a little too long before letting her tongue slide across Melanie’s parted lips, testing. It trails a feeling like static across Melanie’s skin, numbed and intensified.

Melanie should shove her back, she thinks, should slash at her throat with the knife while she’s occupied, get those hands away from her. But this is Helen’s place. She controls whether or not the door is there. If she dies, Melanie might be trapped there. If she’s angered, she might kill Melanie anyway.

It’s an easy enough calculation. Melanie reaches her free hand around the back of Helen’s head, grasping at her hair, and pulls her into a more comfortable position. Helen leans back a little, doesn’t react when Melanie bites at her lip, her hands starting to move lower, tracing with exaggerated care down Melanie’s chest.

Melanie wants to tell her not to be so careful, that she doesn’t mind a few scratches, but then Helen’s kissing her again in earnest, keen fingers fumbling up under her shirt, catching on the threads. Her bra is hanging loose around her chest a moment later, the fastenings neatly severed, and the strange textures of Helen’s hands are running over her breasts, fondling at them. Something that’s too much edge to be a knuckle catches her skin, and Melanie hisses into Helen’s mouth, can feel Helen smile at it.

One of Helen’s hands starts to wander down again down past the waistband of her jeans, easily slicing through the material whenever it obstructs her. It slides between Melanie’s legs, pressing at her through her underwear, before pulling it aside in a shred of cotton.

“Melanie,” she says, testing the word, like she’s asking permission. She isn’t, or, if she is, she doesn’t understand it. She doesn’t wait for an answer, suddenly gone from Melanie’s lips, her touch ghosting down away down Melanie’s stomach, with nothing more than a suggestion of sharpness. She drops to her knees, and peels her jeans gently further down.

Melanie watches her, watches the strangle angles of what should have been bones in her back. She grips the knife, as the sheath is pulled away from it with her clothes, the handle slick against her skin.

Helen bows her head, then presses her face between Melanie’s legs, hands splayed against her thighs, fingers carefully straightened. They’ll leave strange bruises there, Melanie thinks.

She lets her head fall back as Helen’s lips starts to explore, tracing the edge of her labia, and feels the cold surface of the mirror behind it. When she looks, she can see it all, reflected in the mirrors, the skilled outlines of it in the paintings, the faithful renderings of the photographs. Her hand, still clenched in Helen’s hair, the knuckles white. Her ruined clothes, hanging off her in tatters. The faint red lines of scratches down her torso.

Helen’s form in the mirror is not even remotely human, a confusion of angles that starts to ache in Melanie’s head.

Melanie closes her eyes, and, with a small twist of satisfaction in her gut, keeps them that way.

Helen’s tongue finds her clit, and pushes at it, experimental, a burst of static and heat flaring out through Melanie’s abdomen, tangling in her skin. Her knees give out, and she waits to crash down, but the distribution of weight is suddenly different – she’s on her back now, dizzied by the shift of perspective and Helen’s mouth. She’s grasping Melanie’s thighs now, blood starting to trickle down from where her fingers dig in, and the pain drags itself like a bramble stem through the rest of it.

She comes, hard, and has no idea if what is on her lips is a plea for Helen to stop or go on or just her name. The knife drops from her stiff hand, with a soft thud against the carpet, and Helen picks it up for her, considering it with the same slow intensity she did everything.

Helen meets her eyes, then leans in to lick a line across the scratches she’s left, the now-familiar pressure of her tongue aching through Melanie’s body. She brings the knife up, following the inside of her thighs, and alarm trickles through Melanie’s fogged mind.

“No,” she says, distantly even to her. “That’s not-”

Helen pushes the hilt of the knife up into her, still warm from her hand. It slides in almost easily, and Melanie thumps her head back into the mirror again, clenching around it, groaning.

Helen’s mouth finds hers again, and Melanie loses track of everything but the woman and monster that splays her legs and mind open, and steals the sense from everything but herself.

When she comes back to herself, she’s sitting at her desk in the Archives again, skin gooseflesh from her newly-inadequate clothes. She aches, and the scratches on her legs have formed scabs. There’s a taste on her lips that she thinks might be from between Helen’s legs, but it’s not something she can place or compare. She checks her watch, and there's a flare of irritation through her gut at the hours that have passed.

She looks for Helen, but Helen is long gone, and, though Melanie looks for the door, this time she has taken it with her.

-

Helen doesn’t stay gone. She’s back a few days later, knocking on the edge of Melanie’s desk, so that she can feel the wood move with it, where her arms rest on the surface.

“Helen,” Melanie says, looking up. She doesn’t reach for the knife. Her stomach still thrills with the memory of the handle’s shape. She wants to stand up, wants to go to Helen, kiss her, drop to her knees in front of her, right there in the Archives, where anyone could see but no one and everything will.

She smiles.

“Hello,” Helen says. She holds out a hand, and Melanie swallows. She had dreamed of those inside her too, the night before, and doesn’t know if it’s a memory or not.

“What did you need help with?” Melanie asks.

“Clarity,” Helen says. “You have it. I don’t. People aren’t supposed to have it around me, I’m not supposed to make sense to them. I would like to, to myself, or to be able to accept that I don’t. I don’t want to feel the way I feel when I take someone. You don’t feel that way. You always make sense.”

Melanie stifles a laugh. Helen’s after exactly what she had taken from Melanie. Clarity had been gone from her from the moment of that first kiss, her body singing with a song that was far from both the Institute’s, and that of the blood that called out for her to spill it.

“I thought that meant that you could help me,” Helen says.

“Did that not help?” Melanie’s voice threatens to rise, and she stifles it.

“I enjoyed it,” Helen says. Her hand makes an uncomfortable shadow against the desk. “It made me feel better. But it didn’t help.”

Melanie stands up, the motion heavy. There is a door in the wall behind Helen. She knows where it leads.

“In there?” she asks.

“Through there,” Helen says. Her arm doesn’t waver, still expecting Melanie’s agreement. “I want you to kill someone. I think that would help. If we did it together. The door will take us there.”

“Where?” Melanie already half-knows the answer, everything in her straining towards it.

“To the man who trapped you here.” Helen blinks, as though that much should have been clear. “I still want to help you, too. I want him to die in the corridors. You can kill him there, if you like.”

Melanie takes Helen’s hand, and squeezes it hard enough to feel the spiralling bones imprint their patterns over her skin. Helen smiles, and they pull each other towards the door.


End file.
